Deep Harbour by Tove Alsterdal

Author:Tove Alsterdal [Alsterdal, Tove]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Kerstin.

He remembered her now. Her warmth under the blankets, her messy hair and soft fragrance, the feeling of wanting to stay. To cling on.

Steve couldn’t picture her face, but there was something painful in there, and he tried to avoid anything that hurt. He’d become a master at getting hold of medication for that sort of thing, knew exactly what to tell the doctors. Trouble sleeping, various aches. Smoking a joint sometimes helped, but the woman in front of him was a police officer.

The shaking in his hands had gotten worse over the past year. Time didn’t exist; it was a jester laughing in his face.

Did you really think we’d let you get away, Stevie boy? You dumb, dumb knucklehead, marching down the avenue. You’re a pig, Carrano …

Knucklehead, dumbass, pig.

He had left that all behind, or so he thought. Vietnam, the politics, the sense of being followed that made him lock his door. He turned the Back Soon sign and showed Eira Sjödin through to the little kitchen behind the shop.

‘Sorry, it’s a bit cramped. I only have instant coffee.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘The owner of the building wants to kick me out so they can rent the place to a coffee-shop chain and double the rent, but they won’t get rid of me that easily.’

He suddenly saw the place through her eyes. The burn marks on the waxcloth, the smell of old smoke. The crack in the mug he handed her.

Vinyl had surged in popularity lately. Young people had started buying record players, and they loved the sleeves, had rediscovered listening to music the way it was meant to be heard. They were happy to pay hundreds of kronor for Thin Lizzy and Dire Straits, several thousand for important first-press LPs. Steve enjoyed talking to them, putting on a track they hadn’t heard before or introducing them to a classic guitar solo. Young guys with their entire lives ahead of them, the thrill when they found something they didn’t realise they’d been looking for.

It was the year the Stones released ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, that was what came to him now.

1968.

The music brought back memories, one after another. A barn that still stank of livestock even though it had been empty for so long it was practically falling down. There were areas where the rain got in, and he remembered the sound of it dripping onto wood, into a metal bucket. People had brought them mattresses, firm things stuffed with black horsehair that poked out through the rough fabric and made them itch. Moonlight seeping in through cracks in the walls.

‘This is my mum,’ said Eira Sjödin, handing him her phone, a photograph. ‘It was taken in June 1968. Was it you behind the camera?’

Three young people sitting on a blanket on the grass. Steve quickly put it down on the rickety table.

The police officer was heavily pregnant, and perhaps that was why he struggled to see her as the cop she claimed to be.

The daughter, too, of the young woman in the picture.

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